Agi Geva

You’re 14 years old. You’re forced from your home, taken to a concentration camp, ordered to undress by gunpoint, and then shoved into a shower. Humiliated and traumatized, a stranger proceeds to shave off all the hair on your body and completely “disinfect” you. The year is 1944 and you’re a victim of the Holocaust.

You might have read similar scenarios out of history books or watched films that documented the horrifying events of the Holocaust. Yet nothing compares to the first-hand accounts of Holocaust survivors themselves, and tonight I had that rare opportunity.

Tonight’s lecture kicked off Meadow’s Third Annual Communicating Excellence Symposium, “Better Communication for Better Leaders on Human Rights.” All semester we’ve been lucky to hear respected and high profile communications professionals share their experiences, but nobody can top what survivor Agi Geva had to say.

Although the Hungarian native was a little more difficult to understand than our previous speakers, her words were incredibly powerful: parts of her story literally sent chills running through my body. Her description of Auschwitz and the torture she was subjected to during her time there was almost hard to believe. But what’s even harder to believe is that despite how far we think we’ve come, genocide is actually still happening in places around the world. 

We are lucky to have courageous people, such as Agi, share their stories with us. Some might find it too painful to re-live the trauma and misery they suffered through those horrible years, but if these stories weren’t told, we wouldn’t be able to effectively communicate the issues affecting the struggle for human rights.